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All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a